I always believed in God.
Even when my faith wasn’t particularly strong, I never had much trouble believing there was something greater than us behind all of this. I could look at the world, at life itself, and it just made sense to me that there was a Creator.
But believing in God and knowing Him personally turned out to be two very different things.
For a long time, the God I pictured was somewhere up there on His throne. If I’m being completely honest, I probably imagined an older guy with white hair and a beard, looking down at me after I screwed something up again and shaking His head.
There he goes again.
What a disappointment.
I believed in God. I even prayed to Him. But I didn’t really understand who He was.
Believing in God and Knowing Him Personally
Because I saw God primarily as a judge, I approached Him that way.
When I did something wrong, I figured I needed to balance things out somehow. Maybe if I did something good, helped somebody, or straightened myself out for a while, I could get back in His good graces.
And when I really needed something from God, prayer could become a bargaining session.
God, if You help me with this, I’ll…
You can probably fill in the rest.
There was another problem with that way of thinking. I would look around at people who seemed much better at this than I was. They appeared more religious, more disciplined, more deserving.
Compared with them, I didn’t think I measured up very well.
Looking back, I can see the flaw in the whole system. I was keeping a scorecard that God never gave me.
Scripture puts it much more clearly:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”
— Ephesians 2:8–9 (NIV)
That took me a long time to really understand.
Someone Was Planting Seeds
Church wasn’t a major part of my childhood. We went occasionally, but it wasn’t something that dominated our family life. My mom didn’t sit us down for Bible lessons or push religion on us.
But she believed in God.
And every once in a while, Mom would say something about faith that stuck with me.
She was this little lady raising four kids, and somehow she had a way of saying something at just the right time. I couldn’t tell you that I understood the significance of those moments back then. I just knew that certain things she said stayed with me.
Today, I look back differently.
I believe God was using her.
Not through some carefully planned religious instruction. Not through long theological discussions. Just through a mom whose faith occasionally came through in a few words that her son happened to remember.
Dad was different. He had served in the military in the 1950s and later became a tradesman. He came from a generation of men who didn’t necessarily talk much about what was going on inside. He was more of a don’t complain, keep moving forward kind of guy, and especially with us boys, he was the disciplinarian in the family.
Later in his life, though, I remember hearing him talk about “the Man upstairs.” As my own faith grew stronger, our conversations about faith grew too, although ours were probably a little more man-to-man than the conversations I had with Mom. I can’t say exactly what was happening in Dad’s heart along the way, but before he passed, I knew where he stood. I knew his faith was in Christ as his Savior.
I find it interesting how God can work that way. Sometimes we recognize what He was doing only years later.
And there was another part of this that became especially meaningful to me.
After I became a Christian and began growing in my own faith, Mom and I could talk about Christ in a way we never had before. We had some deep conversations about faith, but they weren’t heavy or forced. I enjoyed them, and I know she did too.
We finally understood each other on a level that hadn’t been there before.
I’m grateful we had those conversations before she passed.
The Part I Had Backwards
What changed for me wasn’t simply that I started believing in God.
I already believed in God.
What changed was that I began to understand what Christians meant when they talked about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Before that, I honestly didn’t know what that meant.
I had spent years thinking almost transactionally about God. Do something wrong, make up for it. Do something good, gain a little ground. Need something, make a deal.
The problem was that everything depended on me.
And if everything depended on me being good enough, I already knew I had a problem.
Then I began to understand Christ.
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
— Romans 5:8 (NIV)
Notice when that says Christ died for us.
It doesn’t say after we cleaned ourselves up. It doesn’t say once we had enough good deeds on the other side of the scale. It says while we were still sinners.
That changed the equation for me.
I wasn’t going to earn God’s love by finally becoming good enough. I wasn’t going to outperform somebody else and move higher on some imaginary spiritual ranking.
It wasn’t about what I could do to make God love me more.
Christ had already done what I could never do for myself.
If you’ve ever struggled with the idea that you need to add something to what Christ has already done, I wrote more about that in: The Gospel Doesn’t Need a Plus Sign.
Grace Didn’t Make How I Live Unimportant
There’s an important distinction here.
Understanding grace didn’t lead me to believe that it doesn’t matter how I live. Following Christ has changed how I look at my choices, my priorities, my failures, and certainly my sin.
But the reason is different.
Trying to live a life that honors God isn’t a payment I’m making so He will accept me. It’s not a way of getting myself back into His good graces every time I fail.
The relationship comes first.
Jesus said:
“If you love me, keep my commands.”
— John 14:15 (NIV)
For me, that’s very different from Keep my commands so maybe I’ll love you.
Grace doesn’t make obedience meaningless. It puts it in the right order.
And when I fail—and I still do—I don’t have to picture God staring down from heaven thinking, Here he goes again. I knew he’d screw this up.
I can confess it honestly. I can turn from it. I can ask for forgiveness.
And I can trust what Christ has already done.
A God I Thought I Knew
Sometimes I think about how long I believed in God without really understanding Him.
There were signs along the way. There were things my mom said that stayed somewhere in the back of my mind. There were moments when I prayed. There was always that underlying belief that God was there.
But knowing that God exists isn’t the same thing as knowing Him.
For years, I had created a version of God in my own mind—a distant judge whose opinion of me seemed to rise and fall according to my latest performance.
Christ showed me something very different.
I’m still growing in that understanding. I certainly don’t have everything figured out. But I no longer believe I’m negotiating my way into God’s favor or trying to accumulate enough good to outweigh everything I’ve gotten wrong.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest differences between simply believing there is a God and beginning to know Him through Christ.
One says, I know You’re up there.
The other begins to understand who He is, what Christ has done, and why grace was necessary in the first place.
And looking back now, I can see that He was working in my life long before I understood any of that.
More Straight Talk on Faith
Want More Real-Life Faith?
Looking for more straight talk about faith—without the sugarcoating?
If you’re searching for real-life encouragement and honest faith, check out my book, YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE: Christianity… From a Firefighter’s Perspective. It’s a short, straightforward read—something I wrote for regular folks, maybe especially guys, who want a no-nonsense look at faith that applies to real life. I often think of it as my own “tract”—just a simple way to point people to hope and honor God.
If it rang true for you or made a difference in your life, leaving a quick review on Amazon may help someone else who’s looking for the same kind of hope.
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